Naeem Mohaiemen

Naeem Mohaiemen explores histories of the international left, and the contradictions of borders, wars, and belonging in South Asia, through essays, photography, and film. Since 2006, he has worked on The Young Man Was, a history of the 1970s ultra-left, with each chapter in a different medium. Essays include "Islamic roots of Hip-Hop" (Sound Unbound, MIT Press), "Live true life or die trying" (Visual Culture Reader, 3rd Ed., Routledge), and "These guys are artists and who gives a shit" (System Error, Silvana). Research themes have been described as "not yet disillusioned fully with the capacity of human society" (Vijay Prashad, Take on Art).

Responses

This comment by Maha Mamoun about the uses of the archive may be of related interest.

"When I first started to inquire about how to get permission to use these scenes, I was advised by a friend in the industry not to start this quest for permissions as it would open up an overly complicated chase with no clear standards or procedures. This advice may have been affected by the knowledge of the context I work in, as a visual artist, and the field and venues my work will end up being shown in, which have so far been fairly “under the radar”. I imagine the advice would have been different if I had worked in cinema or television. I did not know which films I wanted to use or the durations of the scenes I would use until the work was complete, which did not make for a timely investigation of the question of rights. I comforted myself with the “quotations” alibi. Three years later, I am still trying to figure how to resolve this question of rights.Copyright laws and definitions of what falls in the “public domain”, which I am sure are more or less clear if one undertakes this research, were not so apparent to me. Or at least they were not the issue for me at the time of doing this project. In a second video that I’ve just recently made using clips from videos posted on YouTube, I was able to directly contact the people doing the uploading, who mostly happened to be the owners of that material, and they readily and simply allowed me to use it."